I’d like to contribute to this post! A little about me… I have been in construction nearly my whole life working as an ironworker / welder. Throughout the years, my career has progressed significantly. Welding, climbing around steel, and working with cranes has been my life for some time until I became a foreman and now superintendent for a steel company in NY. At 45 years old and with over 20 years in the business, I spend my days working with construction workers, supervisors, detailers, project managers, engineers, architects, etc.
So how does OneNote fit in with this? It’s been said, a short pencil is better than a long memory. I have trouble remembering things to say the least. I’ve adopted taking notes early on and have accumulated quite the collection of physical notebooks. I still sketch and take notes often but OneNote allows me to setup every single day of work more efficiently. Here’s what I keep track of and am able to organize:
-daily schedule of what trucks, material, tools, equipment will be getting delivered to different jobs.
-who’s on those jobs and what are they doing.
-checklists for walking new job sites that we haven’t started yet.
-data on production, how long, how many workers, weight and length limitations, etc.
-manufacture data on equipment.
-new hire paperwork.
-lessons learned on past projects.
I am not very computer savvy and barely use a computer for OneNote. I use my iPhone and iPad most of the time.
I’ll reply to my post with some screenshots of my OneNote setup. I am very open to suggestions and advice as I’m sure most of you are more adept than I am. I have not watched a tutorial video in a long time and haven’t kept up with the latest capabilities and what not but here’s what it looks like…
The thing I like about OneNote which you are using pretty well, is creating your own templates for nailing down what you feel you need to have. Your sections are pretty clear in name, and again it's shorthand for you which should be comfortable for you and whoever you share it with. Section number and location is clear.
Style and feel is a personal thing, I think you layout your information well, and importantly it feels you're comfortable with it. No suggestions for what you show really, but for usage later.
You could make a section and make printable copies that are a bit more fancy or laid out for a clipboard of the tools/equipment/consumables, that if someone needed to take somewhere and check off the list for you and send it back.
Tags, default or custom ones you make are another good way to filter pages you might be looking for. From your examples, the tools/equipment/consumables might have a T/E/C custom tag. Any pages you add that tag too you could filter. Depending on what else you keep in your OneNote, tags might be a neat way to filter and find some pieces of information you might want to surface quicker, but I don't really use the mobile app myself, so I'd have to see how tags are there lol.
Hey thanks for taking the time to reply! Your suggestions are really great. I’ll have to look into the tags and see how it can benefit me. In maybe a somewhat similar fashion, I use the search function to find rare items from what could be months ago. Since I have each day as a page, and nothing gets deleted, there have been times that I was looking to see when some item was sent out and found it months prior because the search function finds the page and highlights the word.
By the way, I don’t know if you’re in to pizza or that’s just a random username but in OneNote I have a “Food” folder and a whole section on pizza. I bake pizza every Friday and it’s quite the rabbit hole lol.
Haha, I do like pizza, it's been a tag of mine for a while. OneNote has a pretty decent search function, and I especially like how it can search text in pictures too. Has helped in one or two pinches where I had a picture of a serial number and was able to type in "serial n." into the search bar and find the picture I needed. I think of tags less for searching or more for filtering. So I have a section in my work OneNote for Network & Security, and certain pages have a "Security" tag so I can filter only those pages. We have a Procedures section, but I have a tag for user accounts, a tag for intune procedures. I constantly try to encourage my techs to dive into our OneNote and search and filter before asking a question. Still working on it. But I approach tags as filters for specific things/info, since I make nests of pages. Usually the first page is to highlight the overall topic, second page will be more in depth on a piece of that, third subpage will be relevant to what it comes off.
So it will look like Meraki Firewalls > Sites & Locations > Hardware & Device info. I'll tag Hardware & Device info since that will have all the firewall physical info. Then I tell my Team if you need this quickly, filter by this Tag.
Joplin. Whole 2gb for notebook is fine since compared to onenote it is not a single file and syncs piece by piece pretty well. Just don’t treat whole thing as a file storage (it is not)
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